Tuesday, September 27, 2016

The Legend of Zelda: NES Link Painting

This is a big year for Zelda fans because
Nintendo finally announced that Breath of the Wild is releasing next year. In order to celebrate my love for the
franchise I wanted to do a painting that I’ve had on my mind to do for a long
time; the animated character version of Link from the original NES Zelda game. This version of Link can be found on the map
that was included with the game.

I started this painting off by practicing how to
draw Link multiple times on paper. One
of the difficulties I encountered at first was the lack of colour and shades
within my drawing. But then I decided to
just keep going and worry about the shades later. I then drew a basic sketch on a 5 x 7 canvas,
which is my current size preference. I
went with a white background because it looks cleaner, and because animated
colours tend to pop out more. I then
painted all of Link’s colours and shades in one swoop.

Thankfully, rushing like this made it easier to
overcome my worries of the painting not looking good. I then used a thin brush to do the lines
which gave it a cel shading look, that worked perfectly. I did make mistakes along the way, but the
size of the painting made it easy to correct any imperfections. Now that I am done I am very happy with the
end result, and I hope to one day do another Link painting.